Control was destined to become an RPG franchise all along, says creative director: ‘That’s how Control was born’

Control Resonant is going to be an RPG—that much we knew, with PCG’s very own Robin Valentine being actively surprised by just how much of a Diablo-like it was when he saw it back in March. But did you know the Control series was always meant to be an RPG? Me either.

Per creative director Mikael Kasurinen, who spoke with our friends over at GamesRadar+ during Gamescom Latam this year, it was always destined to become an RPG series. No, more than that—Control was actively the first step towards making it so.

“When I was thinking about Control, and it wasn’t called Control or anything like that, but I had this kind of thinking in my head that I wanted to create an RPG franchise,” says Kasurinen, “The question was, ‘What would it be? What’s the Remedy version of that?’ The way to learn is to start by doing, and that’s how Control was born.”

Hearing Kasurinen talk on it, though, it seems like the plan wasn’t to jump headfirst into RPG territory—but instead to figure out how to make the structure of an RPG without any of the usual elements: “There was a main story, but there’s also these other stories as well. You had side quests. We’d never done that before. We’d never done dialog choices before, where you talk to a character [and] you can choose what to say. All that stuff was new.”

I’d hesitate to call Control an RPG—during our morning meeting, we settled on it being more like a metroidvania—but hey, that makes sense to me. Why completely reinvent your process when you can just Ship of Theseus it—replacing little planks and design intents until you’ve got a full-on RPG series?

Control Resonant, Kasurinen adds, is the next step towards that eventuality: “I wanted to stop calling it action adventure. Instead, like, no, it’s an action RPG. This is Remedy’s RPG franchise, and we’re gonna kind of embrace that, fully commit to it, and so on, and go even further into that direction.”

As Robin noted in his preview, Resonant has stat screens, talent trees, and customisable weapons—looking more like Diablo than Alan Wake, so that’s absolutely mission accomplished, there. And while the shift might seem somewhat strange, the way I figure it, Remedy’s always done something a little weird with each of its titles. Even if it doesn’t always work out (cough, Firebreak, cough).

Anyway, I fully expect the next Control game to be a full-on Disco Elysium text-based adventure, where all of the voices in your heads are SCP-style cognito-hazards, and… wait, hold on. That started as a joke but I’m talking myself into it. Get Kim Kitsuragi in there, too.